To illuminate the notion of ‘totality’ in Wagner’s conception of the ‘total art work’ or Gesamtkunstwerk, this chapter invokes Schopenhauer’s claim that ordinary life is like a phantasmagoria or dream – a claim that epitomises his interpretation of Kant’s theory of knowledge. The chapter associates the notion of a phantasmagoria with that of a dream, and the latter with the nineteenth-century conception of the unconscious, in particular as presented in Freud’s characterisation of dreams as multidimensional semantic expressions. Wagner’s operas are accordingly considered to be phantasmagorias in this dream-associated sense. Wagner is often appreciated as a forefather of modernism, but by recognising the phantasmagoric, semantically-multidimensional quality of his operas he can be seen further as a forefather of postmodernism.

This chapter is a declaration of the author’s translational assumptions: rhythm is a force that resists the signified; translation promotes sense-making rather than the gathering of meaning, the relational and the associative rather than the intelligible; back-translation is indispensable to translational exchange and dialecticity; translation operates most fruitfully in the ST’s invisible; the text is not the ST but the totality of its possibilities. A translation of Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus 1, 5 exemplifies this notion of totality. And the translational involvement of the performing body is illustrated in a translation of the first stanza of Verlaine’s ’En sourdine’. In conclusion, the chapter revisits distinctions between vocative and accusative perspectives, sense and meaning.

The figure of the spy is almost invariably tied to the concept of the nation and of the sovereign state – so much so that, as this chapter suggests, the removal of the state from the spy story would amount to what might be thought of as an ontological reconfiguration of the genre. William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy – Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) – effects just such a reconfiguration. The chapter traces the ways in which Gibson reimagines the figure of the spy in the age of the global and unearths the implications of this transformation. While the centrality of the nation-state has much to do with the conservativism that typically underpins spy fiction, the absence of the state in the Blue Ant trilogy’s global setting does not serve to transform a fundamentally conservative genre into a progressive one; rather, it points to something that is in fact more regressive: the emergence of a neo-feudal world.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, there has been a resurgence of Marxist feminism, with many writers and activists engaged in assessing its theoretical and political adequacy for the present conjuncture. It is in this context that social reproduction theory has come to be a rallying point. Central to this theory is the claim that the sustenance of life and human relationships, whether or not it is recognised as (waged) labour, is fully integral to capitalism as a mode of production. For many feminists, this sustenance is understood more specifically as the reproduction of labour-power. Social reproduction theory positions gender, and gendered labour, as central to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. It thus follows historic trends in Marxist feminism which analysed the structural role of social distinctions such as gender or race in capitalism, rather than seeing them as ‘superstructural’ (ideological or cultural) phenomena.

Chapter 4 discusses how capital for Marx functions as a totality. It also explains how Marx’s conception of totality is based on Hegel’s conception of the logic of essence. Capital has a sui generis character, and is able to maintain and reproduce itself through individuals. Thus, the ground-level of domination in capitalism is not the domination of capitalists over workers, but the abstract domination of the totality of capital over both capitalists and workers. It is true that individuals can exert power over each other; yet they can do so not due to their personal characteristics, but in fact as a “personification of economic categories.” Finally, I observe that the power of capital has an impersonal and non-intentional character, although that power must necessarily be mediated by the action of individuals.

Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining the most fundamental category of domination in capitalism: “totality.” According to Adorno, the ubiquity of the exchange of commodities makes society in capitalism a totality. Individuals, on pain of perishing, must necessarily follow the logic of exchange. The totality, therefore, effectively functions as a “spell” from which nobody can flee. Turning to the logic of essence, I then reconstruct the dialectical development of the category of totality. Hegel first conceives of totality as an “actuality” that, like an organism, has the ability to maintain and reproduce itself across different circumstances. The most determinate form of actuality for Hegel is “substance.” Although individuals as “accidents” constitute substance, they remain subject to the “absolute power” of substance. It seems to individuals that they have power over each other, yet the power of individuals is an objective illusion. In fact, it is the totality of substance that makes one individual powerful and the other powerless.

Milton’s command of the Bible in the original languages (Hebrew, Greek, etc.) as well as in English created the resonance of Paradise Lost, notably in such passages as the catalogue of the devils in Book One and the summary of the entire Bible in Books Eleven and Twelve. Milton focused, however, on the myth of Eve and Adam to seize upon the Bible as a whole and to emphasize that universal humanity is his subject. But Milton is free and original in how he uses the Bible, scaling up small things to giant proportions, as with Sin and Death, and downplaying or ignoring traditional Christian themes, such as the personal nature of our relation to God. Milton reads the Bible as a Christian humanist: for political ends in this world. The “paradise within” prophesied by the angel Michael at the end of Paradise Lost is the political ideal for “mankind” as a whole, for humanity, at the end of Paradise Regained.